Vertical trellising of grapevines is used to support the foliage of a grapevine in an elevated position relative to the grapes or berries. This exposes the berries to more direct sunlight, which is helpful to berry development.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,501,035 to Downer, et al. disclosed a trellis wire support assembly comprising a first wire member and a second wire member. The first wire member had a pair of arms formed to support trellis wires against both upward and downward loading. The second wire member was plastically deformed to cinch around and securely fasten the first wire member to a vertical grape stake. This trellis wire support assembly overcame many of the disadvantages which had been seen in the prior art. In particular, these earlier prior art systems were unable to easily mount and remove their trellis wires from the actual wire support assembly, and were also unable to retain the trellis wires in circumstances where an upward loading force was present on these wires. Therefore, these prior art trellis wire support assemblies could not be easily and quickly installed on grape stakes using only simple tools. Accordingly, they had required a tedious and costly installation procedure.
In spite of its many advantages, however, the Downer system still has some remaining disadvantages. Specifically, it required the use of two separate wire support members which were to be used in conjunction with one another. This required the first wire member to be held in position against the side of a grape stake while the second wire member was then plastically deformed to cinch around this first wire member and thereby securely fasten this first wire member to the grape stake, thus forming the installed trellis wire support assembly. This second wire member was of a small size and it had to be held snugly in position against the first wire member when being plastically deformed. Due to this small size, an installer could easily fumble with this second wire member during its installation. An installer was also required to hold both the first and second wire members simultaneously in position against the side of the grape stake when installing this trellis wire support assembly. For these two reasons, an operator was typically required to use additional holding and twisting tools when installing the existing Downer trellis wire assembly. A final disadvantage of this assembly was that it was specifically limited to receive only one particular size and shape of grape stake. This was due to the fact that the particular grape stake being used had a T-shaped cross-section and therefore the wire members wrapped around the periphery of this cross-section following a triangular path around this T-shape. specifically, the first wire member wrapped around two sides of the triangle and the second wire member enclosed the final third side of this triangle. Since the first wire member was bent to be pre-angled to wrap only around a particular size and shape periphery of grape stake, and since the second wire member was formed of a particular length to span the third size of this triangle, the existing Downer trellis wire assembly was not freely adaptable for use with variously sized grape stakes, without modifications being made to both the size and/or bended shape of the first and second wire members.
Consequently, it is an object of the present invention to provide a trellis wire support assembly which does not require the use of a small second wire member in its installation.
It is a further object that this new trellis wire support assembly be easily adaptable for installation on differently sized grape stakes without requiring the use of special installation tools.
It is another object that the present trellis wire support assembly be easily installable without the installer fumbling with the assembly during its attachment to a grape stake.